More Evidence of Underage China Gymnasts

Aug. 25, 2008— -- The Beijing Olympic Games are over, but the questions continue over whether some medal-winning Chinese gymnasts were too young to compete under Olympic rules.

Mike Walker, the blogger who last week unearthed documents apparently showing that Chinese gold medal gymnast He Kexin was underage, Sunday posted information suggesting that He's teammate, Jiang Yuyuan, was also too young to compete.

Along with He, Jiang helped China capture its first-ever women's gymnastics team gold.

Last week, Walker, under the blog name "Stryde Hax" posted copies of what appear to be two online registration lists from earlier competitions that listed He's birth date as Jan. 1, 1994.

Walker, a computer security professional who works for New York-based Internet security firm Intrepidus Group, said the documents he found last week were once on the Web site of the General Administration of Sport of China. Although the documents themselves are no longer available online, Walker used Chinese search engine Baidu's caching tool to view the information.

A cache is a temporary storage area that duplicates and collects information that is indexed by a search engine. Even if the original information is deleted, a copy can continue to exist in the cache.

A government-issued passport and identity card state that He is 16 years old, according to documents provided by the Chinese federation to the International Gymnastics Federation.

But if the documents Walker unearthed are accurate, He would be 14 -- that's two years too young to compete under Olympic rules.

Since publishing the material on his blog last week, Walker said his site had been bombarded with comments from Internet users in the United States and China.

Walker said an anonymous source e-mailed him a link to another document still posted on a Chinese government Web site that appears to show that gymnast Jiang Yuyuan was also too young to compete in the Olympics.

Walker conceded that he cannot verify the authenticity of the new document.